Kubuntu 11.10 on a Asus EeePC 1215B

I wanted to have a Netbook – means a light device with 10″ to 12″ size screen, no optical drive, but hell a lot of battery power instead. Using my current Netbook usual screen resolution of 1024×600 turned out to be an issue on some web sites. Some flash based applications and even some desktop application give you a hard time with 600 px height. So the new AMD® Fusion E450 platform you get a more powerful CPU and a screen resolution of 1366×768 let us see if this is enough. This machine comes with a 6 cell battery pack, I would love to have more power. Let’s see if this has enough reserves for traveling. Read the details:

Disclaimer

This page is nothing more than my personal experiences with my notebook. This is nothing official from any vendor! I am not responsible for anything you do with your hard- and software. For any support contact the respective vendors! Please respect the legal notice.

Who should read the following description? The machine runs mostly „out-of-the-box“. All the rest is due to you. Be willing to learn, follow instructions form Ubuntu geeks, accept to fail and start again. At least you should know:

Preparations

This Netbook comes with a core Linux based „cloud“ operating system called Express Gate. So especially for warranty reasons it is wise to make a backup of the hard-disk first.

Let’s go: Boot the laptop from Kubuntu Live Flash Drive. You have to plug in the USB-Flash-Drive to a non USB 3.0 port, start the machine, and press <Esc>-Key during start-up. A boot device menu screen shows up, use the flash drive (not the EFI flash drive) option.

After Kubuntu is running attach an external USB-hard-disk, open a shell e.g. by pressing <Alt>+<F2> enter „konsole“ and now you can use the dd-command for low-level backup. Just as example:

Please! Do this on your own risk. Learn about dd in advance (Google is your friend). Be patient the whole process will take more than three hours, because there is a 500 GB storage to be processed at low-level. Finally on my USB-hard-disk it was approx. 9 GB backup data.

Installation of Kubuntu 11.10 „Oneiric Ocelot“

In my netbook there is a AMD® Fusion APU E450 2×1.65GHz CPU, so I used the 64-bit (amd64) version of Kubuntu (http://www.kubuntu.org/download.php). Be careful this machine comes with an EFI-Bios, this demands a „msdos“ formated EFI partition. Do not use the automatic partitioning option during install. It will ignore the GPT „vfat“ /dev/sda1 partition and the bootloader GRUB2 will be lost. The system will not boot and stops asking for a proper boot device.

Use the manual partitioning option, leave the /dev/sda1 as it is, use the major portion of the HDD for the core system „ext4“ and you will net a swap partition. Boot device is /dev/sda. My partition is like this:

Update 12.04: I tried the automatic partioning and again it failed. This time it was easy to fix. Boot main system from HDD via USB-Flash-Drive, then sudo grub-install /dev/sda.

+ Graphics card — AMD® Radeon HD 6320

XServer starts with the correct resolution and 3d support. The open source „radeon“ driver seems to be fine. Glxgears reports approx. 60 FPS.

Using standard ATI binary „fglrx“ X.Org driver KDE>System>Additional drivers works but shows an annoying „Unsupported Hardware“ watermark on the screen. Installation of the „updated driver“ fglrx-updates fails. The newest ATI driver 13th of December 2011 is working but even without 3D support also fglrxinfo throws some errors.

Update 12.04: The AMD Driver 12.4 works as explaned at http://wiki.cchtml.com/. This is really great you can watch full HD videos without stutter. fgl_glxgears reports approx. 335 FPS.Update 12.10: The AMD Driver 13.1 (is the first one that) works as explaned at http://wiki.cchtml.com/. fgl_glxgears reports approx. 300 FPS.

+ Power management — ACPI

Battery sensor works, lid close, screen power save and automatic shut-down on low energy level. Because there is a Eee PC manager I installed jupiter:

++ Suspend to ram

Works as designed, I do not know if really every device is up and running again after suspend but it seems so USB, network, no complains from my side.

— Suspend to disk, hibernate

Does not work, the system shows a black screen and a blinking cursor. To open the Grub2 menu by holding <Shift> did not work. Strangely someone reported to remove the power and battery. Gladly this worked, the system resumed. As I do not use hibernate I do not care. Via Google I found one user who solved this using http://thecodecentral.com/2011/01/18/fix-ubuntu-10-10-suspendhibernate-not-working-bug. If you worked out to get hibernate working, please leave a comment, I will add this here.

Update 12.04: I turned off the C6 CPU mode via BIOS settings.

++ Touchpad

Works fine.

++ USB

Works fine. I have no USB 3.0 device yet so I can not report any performance figures.

++ Keyboard

The typical ACPI control keys work: brightness, volume, mute and media control keys. The keyboard offers hell a lot of other function key, they do not work. The wireless lan key (upper left corner) works, as well as the <Fn>+<F2> key the WLAN the interface will get out of service. The blue „Radio“-LED glows when either WLAN or Bluetooth is on.

++ Network — LAN

The cable interface works.

++ Network — WLAN

Shows up as „Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller“ works fine. I immediately installed the proprietary driver (KDE>System>Additional drivers) so I do not know if it would work without it.

++ Audio

Works as designed: “ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)”. Take care to configure the HDMI and internal device to your needs. Usually kmix should do the trick, if you need more control install

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

Update: VLC used to start with annoying cracking noise, after a few seconds the sound was fine. To resolve this add „tsched=0“ in /etc/pulse/default.pa to the line

load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

++ SD/MMC card reader

My SD-cards are mounted, works.

++ Bluetooth

Seems to work, it connects. I did not test any details.

++ WebCam

I tried it with Skype shows up as „0.03M UVC WebCam“, should be fine with other software as well.

++ HDMI port

Works fine, even some automated kind of KDE application to choose screen set up pops up when you plug it in and out.

I tried jupiter, as you recommended, but I am having a hard time figuring out if it works. /proc/cpuinfo says it does (at least from 800-1000 MHz, that is w/o turbo of the C-60), but it cannot see the cpu governors (and I cannot manually either, as /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0 does not exist and cannot be created – I only have the super-folder ‚cpu‘)

BTW. I also updated my BIOS to the newest (0503) after testing, of course, so no fuss there. But I am a bit confused about yours 0504 – a typo I guess?

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. The fluent 720p (x264) in VLC is only using around 50 % of both cores with HW acc (Preferences – Input / Codecs), while using 100 % w/o HW acc and not quite as fluent, so UDV definitely kicks in 🙂

hello, werner
Nice to see your blog, i owen this laptop same but has issue with suspend. When I suspend, the following reboot will not succeed, the boot loader(I use grub) is unable to be loaded, then the box will ask me to provide him a bootable media after a while. Many guys experience the same issue like me. I know them in archlinux forums, I’ve tried archlinux 3.x kerne land ubuntu 11.10, the same result. So, could you please tell me how about yours? Although you written it works fine here, i really hope some information to solve the problem. Thanks very much.

at the time I set up the machine I just found hibernate issues in the net. Sometimes when it is left alone the KDE power management sends it to suspend. I do not know if KDE adds some magic here (==different run conditions 🙂
As usual this device platform was brand new at the time being. I expect a superb support with the upcoming 12.04.

of course a resume partition needs to be configured for that (which can be a swap partition large enough..)
radeon.audio=1 enables hdmi port to have audio as well and i need to configure acpi_backlight=vendor for fully functional control of lcd brightness.